12.29.2010

Hope everyone had a great holiday, got lots of goodies and spent JUST the right amount of time with family without going overboard. Between Christmas and relatives I've been sneaking away to work on pages because it'll be a Christmas Miracle if I can meet my page deadline!

But until then, here is more of the story, we're gettin' awfully close to running out of pages to post...

12.02.2010

These are the robots that live in a factory in Chester, Vermont. They are who I'm fixing books for. This company takes their robots and scan in every page of the books I'm working on and are turning it into a digital file. Here are some videos of the robots Doin' their robotty thing. (sorry they're sideways!)

What am I watching Beth?! Well a book is resting in what's called a Cradle (just the sort of trough it's placed in) two air jets on either side of the far right set of pages are called 'Fluffers' (har) and they blow air through the text block so the pages don't stick together. Two clamps appear at the head and the foot of the book to hold the pages open for the camera (located at the top of the robot) can take clean images of each page. Once both pages are photographed (very quickly) a robot arm with a vacuum-like suction reaches over, the clamps release and it turns the page. A human operator stands by and helps flatten out the page for the camera. I mean come on, robots are for getting a job done, not for smoothing silly non-robot pages!

These machines document over 100 pages in 10 minutes and have already photographed 10.5 million pages in the series I'm currently working on restoring at Dartmouth. AWESOME!

But about this 'comics' thing I'm doing...this next week I'm giving a presentation about my Thesis to the whole school as well as a presentation of my Professional Practices Project to my class. Once all of that is over, I'll be posting pages I've worked on again!